Sunday, March 4, 2012

Pieces of Previous Work

I have been fighting a virus the last couple of weeks. Feeling unwell is a real creativity zapper for me. : ( So while I have nothing much new to share with you I realized that there were a couple of watercolour pieces from December that I did not share with you yet. Care to see...?

In one of the watercolur classes we were invited to paint a snow scene. I chose one of the teacher's paintings (our teacher was Joanne Thomson) and painted my interpretation of it. I love how cold it looks... brrrr! ﻿

The painting of rose hips was inspired by some photos I took last summer. During our painting class Joanne advised us to only use the best quality of paper, but I tbought I'd test out some other lesser expensive papers mostly out of curiosity but partly out of thriftiness. As I painted the rose hips I noticed the paint behaved differently on this inexpensive paper, but I told myself that I wasn't all that unhappy with it. At last the painting was finished and the paper was dry so I began peeling away the tape that held the edges of the paper to rigid board... only to have some of the top layer of the paper peel away with the tape! (Did you hear me yelling in frustration that afternoon..??) I stared at the jagged strip of sparking white paper where soft green paint had previously been and felt quite sick. This was never meant to be a masterpiece, but I liked it enough that I would rather have been able to keep it intact! Fortunately I had a small bottle of rice paper paste left over from a craft product and with much patience, diluted rice paper paste and a teeny tiny brush I was able to glue the torn layer of paper back onto the painting. Lesson learned... always use good quality watercolour paper because it costs less in tears and heartache in the long run!

A few weeks back we had a lovely bunch of purple tulips in the house. The graceful curving stems begged me to try and capture their likeness so one afternoon I made this coloured pencil sketch.

And I do have one photo to share, taken a few weeks ago - a sunset taken from the top of South Mountain on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

This business of feeling unwell and being unable to do creative things is really for the birds! I am so looking forward to getting into a new creative project soon. Next post I hope to have more new things to share with you. In the meantime, I hope you're able to put at least a little sunshine in your life through expressing your creativity.